Rapture in Maastricht

The soaring fortunes of Surrealism over the last decade have not left many major paintings by leading artists of the movement lying undetected in dark corners — Max Ernst least of all after the remarkable retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005 (IHT, April 16, 2005). Yet a “Landscape with Seashells,” signed by the master around 1927-28 remained unrecorded in a Paris collection which it entered shortly after its completion. It now hangs here, on the stand of the Galerie Berès of Paris, amidst a host of little-known Cubist works.

Next door, Jacques de la Béraudière of Geneva shows one of the finest pictures of the Paris school of Expressionist Abstractionism. This is a 1962 composition by Pierre Soulages — black bars at a slant, suggestive of wooden planks, cut across a blue and white ground. Further away, at Salis-Vertes of Salzburg, Austria, one of Maurice de Vlaminck’s great Fauve pictures dating from 1906 has turned up after a long absence from the market. In an unusually classical, well-constructed composition of an Île-de-France landscape, bold strokes of green, blue, white and green, and touches of bright carmine red, make the picture sing.